ABSTRACT
PS: Thank you. Thank you, all the contributors to this volume, for taking up so many of the themes that have interested and excited me over the past forty years and more, and for writing an extraordinarily varied set of stimulating papers, stimulating not least in that variety. None the less, beneath the variety there is a unity, as I shall try to show, initially, by saying a word about how all these topics came to be unified for me, what has compelled me to read and write and think about them all, and what was the matrix of ideas that I met when I first came to Cambridge as a student from furthest Worcestershire in 1964. Then I shall try to identify what it is about Goethe that makes him — to use an image of his own, and what a creator of images he was — the ‘figured bass’, the ‘Grundbass’ of these discussions.
